Google buys Quickoffice to challenge Microsoft on own turf

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Google has announced that it has bought Quickoffice for an undisclosed sum.

Quickoffice is one of the world’s most popular office apps, having been downloaded 350 million times, and is available on a number of devices including Android, Symbian, iOS and many more.

"We're happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions," said the company on the official Google blog.

The news should strengthen Google's office offering and means it has a greater set of tools to take on Microsoft, which is expected to expand its mobile Office offering beyond the Windows Phone OS later in the year.

It should also mean that Google Docs finally gets a decent offline mode in both Android and Chrome OS.

Google says: "Quickoffice has a strong base of users, and we look forward to supporting them while we work on an even more seamless, intuitive and integrated experience."